Word: lulu
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...BREUER is directing a rehearsal for the American Repertory Theater production of Lulu. It is less than three hours before the audience will file in to view a preview performance. Floor-standing floodlights and mike cords vie with the actors for elbow room on the thrust stage, surrounded on three sides by technical staff who follow the action below like surgeons starting down on an operation from the balcony...
...pistol cracks-blanks, but as jolting as the real thing. It's the first murder scene, and Catherine Slade, the actress playing Lulu, calls out for champagne. Someone makes a popping noise with his index finger and mouth...
BREUER, prominent in New York as a founder of the experimental Mabou Mines company that works out of Joseph Papp's Public Theater, has a simple answer for why he's directing Lulu, which opens this week: "It's my favorite play." Wedekind's Lulu plays, Earth Spirit and Pandors's Box-a single epic of the rise and fall of a creature of sex-present directors with a simple problem of logistics: in Breuer's words, "how to put the two plays together without making it a six-hour evening and without losing the extravagance...
...clip the scenes in Lulu down to make the thing manageable, you change the play from dramatic to narrative form-which, today, is film. The microphones let the actors be low-key. If you play the hysteria, you'll have one screaming, fucking mess for three hours...
...being too expensive can he and other directors get the kind of audiences they want-not the homogeneously affluent subscribers who keep theaters like A.R.T. afloat yet paradoxically turn ther noses up at the word "experimental," but a younger, more diverse group of people that would approach productions like Lulu with open eyes and ears, and no harumphs...